Population ecology is a major subfield of ecology—one that deals with the dynamics of species populations and how these populations interact with the environment. The older term, autecology refers to the roughly same field of study, coming from the division of ecology into autecology—the study of individual species in relation to the environment—and synecology—the study of groups of organisms in relation to the environmnent—or community ecology. Odum (1959, p. 8) considered that synecology should be divided into population ecology, community ecology, and ecosystem ecology, defining autecology as essentially "species ecology." However, biologists have for some time recognized that the more significant level of organization of a species is a population, because at this level the species gene pool is most coherent. In fact, Odum regarded "autecology" as no longer a "present tendency" in ecology (i.e., an archaic term), although included "species ecology"—studies emphasizing life history and behaviour as adaptations to the environment of individual organisms or species—as one of four sub-divisions of ecology. Ecology is sometimes used as an incorrect synonym for the natural environment. ... In biology, a species is, loosely speaking, a group of related organisms that share a more or less distinctive form and are capable of interbreeding. ... Community ecology is the study of the distribution, abundance, demography, and interactions between populations coexisting species. ...

The development of the field of population ecology owes much to the science of demography and the use of actuarial life tables. Population ecology has also played an important role in the development of the field of conservation biology especially in the development of population viability analysis (PVA) which makes it possible to predict the long-term probability of a species persisting in a given habitat patch (e.g., a national park). While essentially a subfield of biology, population ecology provides many interesting problems for mathematicians and statisticians, which work mainly in the study of population dynamics. Demography is the study of human population dynamics. ... Actuaries are professionals who analyze the financial impact of risk, particularly looking ahead far into the future. ... In actuarial science, a life table (sometimes called a mortality table) is a table of statistics giving information related to: the average probability of survival or death at different ages, remaining life expectancy the proportion of the original birth cohort still alive. ... Some conservation biologists have been concerned about the Amazon rainforest. ... Population viability analysis is a branch of conservation biology dealing with techniques for determining the genetic diversity, spatial and temporal features of a population so as to evaluate the risk of extinction for that population. ... Main article: Life There are many universal units and common processes that are fundamental to the known forms of life. ... Mathematics is the study of quantity, structure, space and change. ... Statistics is a type of data analysis whose practice includes the planning, summarizing, and interpreting of observations of a system possibly followed by predicting or forecasting of future events based on a mathematical model of the system being observed. ... Population dynamics is the study of marginal and long-term changes in the numbers, individual weights and age composition of individuals in one or several populations, and biological and environmental processes influencing those changes. ...

See also:

• population dynamics
• population genetics
• Important publications in autecology

Population dynamics is the study of marginal and long-term changes in the numbers, individual weights and age composition of individuals in one or several populations, and biological and environmental processes influencing those changes. ... Population genetics is the study of the distribution of and change in allele frequencies under the influence of the five evolutionary forces: natural selection, genetic drift, mutation, migration and nonrandom mating. ... // Aerobiology Anatomy Grays Anatomy Arachnology Astrobiology Biochemistry Bionics Biogeography Bioinformatics Biomechanics Biophysics Botany Cell biology Molecular Biology of the Cell Alberts, Bruce; Johnson, Alexander; Lewis, Julian; Raff, Martin; Roberts, Keith; Walter, Peter New York, Garland Publishing 1983-2002 Description: . This is a must-have introduction to cell biology, suitable...

References

• Odum, E. P. 1959. Fundamentals of ecology. W. B. Saunders Co., Philadelphia and London. 546 p.